


The Last Partisan

by softlybarnes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hydra (Marvel), Implied/Referenced Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:27:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24098044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlybarnes/pseuds/softlybarnes
Summary: Maja has been alone for a long time. Apart of a partisan group since almost the beginning of the war, Maja doesn't go home once the war finally ends. A past that she's been running from for years finally catches up to her, and she suddenly finds her fate inexplicably linked with that of James Barnes's.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	The Last Partisan

**Author's Note:**

> This is not like anything I have posted before. This story contains rape, torture, war related trauma.

There’s a crisp chill in the air the morning the day her past finally catches up to her.

Leaves crush and crunch under the heavy jackboots of her enemies, fingers clawing like dread and hell and fear over her spine.

She runs, hides, fights.

She’s good at this, has been good at it for far too long.

The rifle in her hands was given to her by a man that’s been dead for year, the life in his soul punched out with one well aimed kick that chipped and shattered his skull.

Her breath is like fire in her lungs, trees flitting out of the darkness to assault her with bullet pocked skin and knowing knotted eyes. The forest that has become her home is once again littered with men that didn’t belong.

The sun is rising, the mist on the ground matching the air clouded and crowded out of her lungs.

Shouts rise behind her, an icy river appearing in front of her.

She stops, vision blacking and bubbling in spots. Her stomach heaves, clenching around the emptiness that’s plagued her since her father died.

She allows herself two seconds, two precious, lifesaving moments, to take a deep breath of the freezing, whipping wind.

The cold air burns her nostrils, solidifies heavily in her lungs.

She slings the gun over her back and wades into the half-frozen river, ice chunks stabbing at her knees. Really, she doesn’t see any other way forward, though later she’ll wonder if those two seconds cost her her freedom. She’s outnumbered, and though she’s been ready to die and sacrifice for years, she won’t go down without a fight.

Besides, she figures the men with guns and dogs and new heavy boots have plans for her other than a cruel, humiliating death.

She’s forced to swim, halfway across the water. Ice dipping into her lungs, gasping breaths forcing past her lips. Her already heavy clothes weigh her down, waterlogged.

But the only thing she can think about are her wet socks, her numbed toes.

She slogs to the other side of the frozen river of death, knowing she won’t survive, not with sopping wet clothes in October.

The morning sun casts bright yellow beams across the frosted field in front of her, mud slicking her cracked shoes. She lifts the gun back into her hands heavily, tired in a way that makes her want to lie down and never get up.

The trigger is wet, freezing to her still warm skin painfully as she treks across black earth to the tree line that may provide her with a modicum of safety.

Someone fires a shot, the bullet whizzing above her head.

More shouting, confused voices.

Then.

A man.

She stops.

He lifts a gun, pointing it with confidence, sandwiched between two trees. He’s smiling.

She closes her eyes, others appearing beside him, uniforms black in the dim light. 

The bliss of death, of finally meeting her end after so many borrowed years, sinks into her skin like warm butter. She’s ready. She can finally go home, home to meet her mother and father in their tiny kitchen, like she used to dream every night until the harshness of her reality finally quashed it out of her.

But the bullet never comes.

And she knows she was right. There are plans for her yet that don’t include her bloody demise.

Meaty hands force her to her knees, the cap yanked off her head, fingers fisting in her short hair to pull her head back with a snap.

She doesn’t cry out, looking up with a glare so icy it rivals the air around them.

The man smirks at her before glancing at the man. “She looks like a little boy.” He speaks German accented Russian.

“That’s her,” the man with the handgun says as her rifle is ripped out of her hands, harsh fingers tying ropes around her wrists, twisting her arms. “I remember her well.” He leans down, his nose almost touching hers, “You have your father’s eyes. I looked into them as I gutted him like a fish.”

She doesn’t say anything, hatred burning a hole in her belly.

He presses the cold barrel of the gun against her temple. “How easy it would be, to shoot you. You’ve been a thorn in my side for too many years.”

“Then do it,” she answers.

“So it does speak,” he says, smiling benevolently at her. He looks like an aged grandfather, if it weren’t for the gun against her head, and the evil glint in his eye.

She reels back, spitting into his face.

The man holding her cracks her across the face, her cheek smarting, blood pooling in her mouth. The other only pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the saliva from his face.

“We’ll break you,” he assures her, sliding a thumb across her face as someone shoves a dirty rag into her mouth, gagging her. “We always do.”

~

She chopped her hair short, tight against her skull, after she was raped.

Her mother had only been murdered the night before.

And then a man she thought she could trust had wormed his dirty fingers between her legs, forced her open and taken her. She had bled and cried and then cut her hair, disguising herself as a boy as best she could.

He had promised her a way to England, safe passage on a ship to America, away from war and blood.

He was also the first man she had killed, his throat slit on the stairwell as he left the hidden attic room, sated and satisfied. The stairs were sticky and wet with his life after that, but she still managed to steal his shoes.

Now, she would give anything for that man to return to her.

After she spit in the man’s face, whose name she still did not know, she had been gagged and blinded, thrown into the back of a truck that stank of blood and shit. They had driven for a long time, snow whispering between the wooden slats of the canvas covered back. She hoped her heart would stop or that hypothermia might worm its way through her system faster. But she only shivered in the cold, trembling and shaking, losing feeling in her hands and feet, wet clothes in freezing temperatures a hell she did not deserve.

Then she had been moved, shoved without preamble from the truck, mud and newly fallen snow burping around her head, feathering down around her body. Someone’s foot pressed to the back of her head, digging her face into the dirt, until her lungs rattled with a cough that forced them to stop and laugh.

She had been lifted, dragged, kicked inside a building that was scarcely warmer than the outside world. She had heard screaming, grinding, metal and clanging. Human noises that alluded to suffering and death.

Her future, she knew, was rooted here, in this place.

Now, _now_.

Now, now, now.

It was happening again, though there was little chance she’d be able to murder the men raping her _now_. One finishes and another takes his place.

An endless cycle of horror and pain.

She hates them, and knows that her hate is useless. Hate has provided her with absolutely nothing.

At least she’s warmer, her wet men’s trousers stripped away, their bodies, chests, legs, hot against her spine, the backs of her thighs.

The rag tied tightly over her eyes is wet with tears, hot and cold and horrible. The wood of the table she’s crudely bent over bites into her skin.

Her coat, precious and lifesaving, has been taken from her, leaving her in a damp threadbare undershirt.

She wonders then, as another man touches her and laughs, testing the bloody ropes wrapped around her wrists, what she’s done to deserve a hell so all consuming. Her arms are starting to ache, set at an awkward angle behind her back. The cloth in her mouth chokes her, makes the stale, sour air of the cell hard to breathe. Her nose runs, snot coating her lips and chin.

She loses track of time, not sure how long it’s been.

Finally, it ends.

A cold shower, and rough hands.

Men’s clothes that scratch at her skin.

A cell.

A cot.

And the unfortunate realization that she will not die.

She cries silently on the cot, the flimsy, dirty mattress.

It’s the first time she’s laid in a bed since her mother died.

~

A few days pass.

She claws at the walls, screams until her throat is raw and someone comes along to gag her again. She’s subdued twice, beaten often, force fed gruel.

“She reminds me of him, you know,” the man with the handgun says when he comes to visit her, always cordial. “They’re fighters. Animals. They aren’t easy to put down. We’ll manage, in due time.”

She snarls at him, feral.

He slaps her so hard her vision goes dark for a moment. “I thought you would be easier at least. More docile. Your father was easy to break.”

They’re all standing together in her cell, the man with the handgun and her, close and warm. Its almost a good feeling, the feeling of warmth on her perpetually chilled skin.

“I have a deal for you,” he says, delicately dusting off his trousers before motioning to someone she can’t see. “You are brilliant,” he starts, shaking a finger at her, like a chiding father. “Incredibly brilliant. You kept up with your father, shadowed him.” A guard brings in two wooden chairs.

She’s restrained, tied down, ankle and knee and wrist. The gag in her mouth is damp with spit, her nose hot, sniffling with a cold.

“You,” he says, sitting down across from her, crossing his leg at the knee. “Can help us.”

The gag is removed from her mouth.

Her voice is rough, from screaming and crying and not speaking for weeks or months. How long has it been? Since the end of the war? Since the others died or went home? “Help?” She asks.

“You lived in Germany once, yes?”

She nods, digging blunt nails into the wooden arms of the chair.

“You’ve been in the forest a long time,” he says, false sympathy dripping from his lips. “I bet you’d like to go home.”

She doesn’t answer, eyes on the concrete floor of her cell, blood that didn’t belong to her congealed on the floor, trying not to think about the feel of her short hair curling too long against the tips of her ears.

She thinks about the color of her mother’s eyes on a school morning, the sound of her father’s laugh when she met him at the door when he came home from work in the evening.

She thinks about the stiffness growing in her limbs, the cold stickiness of her lips.

“I don’t have a home,” she suddenly snarls, the words ripped from her chest without her permission.

“You could have one again. If you help us.” He pauses and waits, but she only stares at the floor, exhaustion settling around her bones. She wonders how long she can be obstinate before they finally kill her for it.

Silence rattles loudly between them until the man with the gun sighs.

She swallows around the hallow thirst in her throat. “I would rather die.”

“Would you?” He says, sounding only mildly interested.

“Yes.”

The man hums, and someone hands him a file. “You weren’t easy to find you know. It’s good you weren’t, because this time last year, had I gotten my hands on you, I would have gutted you. I so looked forward to the moment I’d finally see your filthy blood run over my hands.”

She stays silent.

“But, you’re useful now. And so you should live.”

He opens the file and reads for a few minutes, ignoring her.

“You were a bright child. An even brighter teenager.” His eyes flick to her, an icy blue so piercing it feels as though he can see through to the center of her bones. “Resourceful. Headstrong. Your father admits here,” he flips the file, a page of her father’s handwriting staring back at her. “that you facilitated his research. That he was nothing without his little daughter’s help. It’s such a pity that you ended up in the forest.”

He shrugs, continuing his monolog as she shifts in her seat, the ropes around her wrists biting cruelly into her skin.

“You showed the resistance how to make explosives. You were the one to suggest arming the rebels.” His eyes flick back down to his limited research. “Tadeusz turned in his weapons a year ago. We had a chat with him several weeks ago, though I doubt he’s still breathing. He said you tampered with equipment, sabotaged tanks and supplies. He said you knew everything there was to know about mechanics. He says you tried your damnedest to make it to Warsaw in time for the uprising. He said you’ve had a death wish since the beginning, but that you must have the blessing of a saint with the luck running in your blood.”

Her breathing stalls at the mention of Tadeusz.

“Why did you stay in the forest?” He leans forward, brushing his long fingers along his pant leg. “When every other person in your pathetic little group turned in their weapons and went home?”

She opens her mouth, lips peeling apart slowly as she leans forward as far as the bindings will allow, eyes hot with hate. “Because the war is not over.”

The man smiles, “And this, fräulein, is one thing we absolutely agree on.” They stare at each other for a long moment before he leans back again and speaks to one of the guards in a language she doesn’t know.

He doesn’t look at her as they wait for whatever he’s asked for. He examines his fingers, fiddles with the button on his suit jacket.

She wants to kill him, run a blade across his throat and watch the crimson stain his perfect clothes.

She wonders if he raped her too, joined in the game his soldiers had played with her.

When she leans back, eyeing his freshly polished shoes, she knows one thing for certain. He would be all too easy to kill.

The sound of a struggle echoes down the long corridor outside her cell, growing louder and louder with each second that passes.

The man rolls his eyes. “This one, always very dramatic. I like you much better. We,” he says, pointing to her and then himself, “get straight to the point.”

She doesn’t know what to make of that, that she’s preferred over the other prisoner being forcibly dragged down the hall.

Eventually, two guards wrestle a man into her cell. He’s shouting and spitting, struggling against the bonds and the guards alike.

He’s filthy, ragged, and beaten to hell.

Electric burns singe the skin of his temples.

He’s forced into another chair, easily restrained.

The man with the gun says her name, and the prisoner suddenly quiets, head whipping to the side, eyes locking on her.

She doesn’t look back at him.

“This is Sergeant James Barnes. He is also a thorn in my side as you can see.” He swallows and glances at James, seeming genuinely irritated. “He’s been very hard to put down. Full of American energy and overenthusiasm.”

James Barnes says something, to which a guard answers gruffly and whips a pistol across his already beaten face.

“What does he have to do with me?”

“It would seem that fate has brought you together.” He leans forward again, looking at her with exasperation, palms up and open, the bloom of opportunity. “Your life and his have become…inextricably linked.”

“Where did you get an American? Not many came east.” They were too far east, in fact. There were Russians in all the towns and villages now that the Germans were gone.

The man smiles. “Germany. A last mission. I’m not sure how wide the legend of the Howling Commandos spread.”

The man next to her snarls something out, spitting blood onto the floor of her cell. “Wide enough.”

He hums, “Yes, well. He was a Hydra prisoner before his friend took him away from us, before the experiment could be completed. And so, we had to get him back. Can’t let the blood of this one go to waste, we gave him too much.”

“Aren’t they missing him?”

“Did anyone miss you?” She feels her heart plummet. It shouldn’t hurt, after all these years of heart aching loneliness, but it does. “Anyways, they think he’s dead. He’s a _hero_.”

Silence falls again, the American James Barnes squirming in his seat, biting out words that only result in another icy punch.

It hurts her, to see and hear such roaring life. This one, she thinks, has something to fight for. Probably someone, probably a family. He would not know the devastating loss that war can bring. His family, his mother and brothers and sisters and cousins were all wrapped up sweetly in their beds.

He has the safety of that knowledge. That war could take him and his brother’s in arms lives, but never his friends, never his family.

She’s not sure if she should speak, still unsure what the man with the gun is asking of her.

She turns her head then, cheek aching, stiff neck protesting the movement, to look at the American soldier who had so suddenly become her soulmate.

He’s already looking at her, his eyes blue and soft against the gaunt bloodiness of his face. His jaw ticks, irritation at being powerless etched deeply in the marble of history already written into his skin.

She thinks he must have been handsome, once. Though, she doesn’t know. She’s never had the time to contemplate men for their handsomeness, only their rage and brutality and hate.

James Barnes opens his mouth and she understands his words.

“I’m sorry.”

Desperation.

Wild hope.

Sorrow as old as time.

Emotions flash through his eyes, across his sticky lips.

What will the man with the gun ask for?

“You see he’s broken. He fell and his arm was ripped away. What we already gave him saved his life. But,” he pauses and sighs loudly. “we haven’t been able to give him a new arm, you see. His body keeps rejecting our engineering. But you might fix him. If we can sort out the arm, we can sort out that mind of his. We can put him down and finally make him the lapdog he should be.”

James’ gaze is still locked on hers, slowly she turns back to the man with the gun. “What do you want?”

“For you to choose.” He pauses, smiles genially at her before he lifts the gun, aims for the space between her eyes.

She sucks in a deep breath of cold, stale, sour air, eyes fluttering shut. Maybe this was the moment, the moment she’d be allowed to make the ultimate sacrifice. The sacrifice her mother had made, her father, so many others.

The man laughs.

He sounds.

Delighted.

Almost playful.

Gleeful.

Her fingers are numb with cold, bones splintering around the ache in her hands.

“Help us fix him, or die.”

“I won’t help you. I choose death. Every time, I will choose death,” she whispers easily, blood settling easily around the choice. “I will always choose death.”

There’s a long pause, in which she becomes acquainted with the all-consuming silence that will engulf her soon. The only sound is the labored breathing of one James Barnes, legendary howling commando, his prowess and sharpshooting skills even reaching her forest.

It’s then that she remembers the man’s words from earlier.

_Your life and his have become…inextricably linked._

Her eyes snap open, the gun is aimed at Barnes.

His eyes aren’t closed. He stares down the barrel of the gun, fearlessness creasing the lines of his mouth, the space between his brows. James’ readiness for death differs from her own, and mirrors it in its entirety.

The man with the gun, whom she’s coming to think of as the Professor, looks back at her.

“There was something else Tadeusz mentioned before he died.” Her heart beats hard against ribs, rattling her bones, splitting her tendons. There’s a faint roaring in her ears, panic beginning to blur her vision. “He said, faced with a choice, faced with the possibility of saving a human life, you will always choose to save them. No matter the risk, no matter the cost. Its why you tried to go to Warsaw, yes?”

She looks at James, who understands nothing of the conversation, the balance his life hangs in.

“So,” says the Professor. “You tell me. Is there hope yet, to save James Barnes’ life?”

He cocks the gun, finger caressing the trigger. “Help us. Or die.”

She looks at James, the set of his jaw, the righteous anger in his eyes. Tortured and bloody, malnourished and weak.

And yet.

And _yet_.

All she sees is hope.

His soul holds the radiance of hope and life, clawing and scratching, kicking and screaming, _life_.

She can’t ignore hope.

She can’t ignore life.

She holds James Barnes’ gaze and whispers his words back to him. She remembers them from earlier, drifting through the chilled air to settle warmly, snugly against her skin.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, the English words broken on her lips.

She’s never spoken English, and thinks it a poor way to start. But her options have narrowed down to one choice.

She can’t choose his death, even if it would mean she could finally have her own.

There’s hope yet, for this fearless American. Maybe even for herself.

The Professor looks delighted when she turns back to him and decides both their fates. “I will help you.”


End file.
